Featured Domains

A Cedar Rapids, Iowa man will head to prison for 20 years for trying to steal a domain name, the Associated Press reports.

By steal a domain name, I mean physically.

Sherman Hopkins Jr. broke into a man’s home on June 21, 2017 with a handgun and demanded that the resident transfer the domain name DoItForState.com to another account, the AP reports. He shot the man with the gun and used a stun gun, but then the man got control of the gun and shot Hopkins back.

Domain name theft happens all of the time, but rarely does it involve a physical altercation. Usually, it’s a matter of stealing someone’s domain name registrar credentials or hacking into their email.

The owner of the domain name since 1999 claimed the domain name was stolen from him after his email account was compromised. Although this apparently happened back in 2015, the owner became aware of the theft much later and filed a lawsuit to try to recover the domain name.

As is usually the case, the thief didn’t show up to defend the domain name. So the court ordered the domain name to be transferred back to the prior owner John Lee of Precision Telephone Services, Inc. The transfer has been completed.

Customers have to make quick switch to avoid security risk and potential outages.

I frequently write about domain name theft. Usually, the only loss in the theft is the domain name. But it can be much worse.

Three domain names belonging to Newtek Business Services Corp. (NASDAQ:NEWT) were recently stolen, as Brian Krebs explains in a post today. Unfortunately, customers used these domain names to access and point to their web services, potentially leading to outages and leaked information.

Krebs details Newtek’s bungled response in his post, but let’s dig a bit deeper into the domain theft.

The three stolen domains were webcontrolcenter[dot]com, thesba[dot]com, and crystaltech[dot]com.

Gong Fan of Shenzhen, China has filed a lawsuit (pdf) to recover 11 numeric .com domain names that he alleges were stolen from him.

According to the suit, Gong Fan is the original registrant of 0001.com, 6007.com, 00088.com, 10099.com, 00086.com, 98988.com, 88199.com, 00018.com, 00019.com, 00020.com and 00021.com. He registered the domain names between 1998 and 2004.

His Gmail account was compromised between August 22 and September 20 of this year and the perpetrator stole the domain names, he claims.

The case was filed in U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Virginia, which is where .com registry Verisign is located. In similar cases, judges have entered default judgments when the thief didn’t respond and have ordered Verisign to transfer the domain names back to plaintiff.

Stevan Lieberman of Greenberg & Lieberman is representing the plaintiff.

Court denies conversion claim because it says domain names are not property.

New York Supreme Court tosses out domain name dispute.

The Supreme Court of the State of New York has denied (pdf) a claim one of Michael Gleissner’s companies brought against Network Solutions.

Gleissner’s company NextEngine Ventures LLC said it bought the domain name Quentin.com for $9,990 in March 2016. It subsequently transferred the domain name to GoDaddy.

After the transfer Network Solutions pulled the domain name back to the account of the previous owner, a woman in Argentina, ostensibly because she claimed the domain name was stolen from her Network Solutions account before being sold. DomainTools historical Whois records show a change in admin email address before the domain was transferred to NextEngine.

NextEngine wanted Network Solutions to pay the $9,990 purchase price plus $28,000, which it says was the appraised value at the time the domain was removed from its account at GoDaddy.

The court denied NextEngine’s claim on the grounds of jurisdiction. It also said that, even if it had jurisdiction, it would have denied the claim. It noted that courts in New York (and Virginia, where the .com registry is located) do not recognize domains as property, so it follows that they can’t be subject to conversion.